Video Marketing Resources
Get Marketing Results for Your Business with Video
Video makes it easy to stand out from your competition. Video can have a massive impact on your marketing KPIs, from email to social media, PPC ads to content marketing and more – if you have a proper strategy.
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Latest Video Marketing Resources
What is Video Marketing?
Video Marketing is using video to promote your product or service, to nurture and convert prospects, and generate revenue for your business.
Why Use Video Marketing?
Business are creating more marketing content (of all kinds) than ever before, and this trend is showing no signs of slowing down.
Over 99% of people who use video for marketing said that they’ll continue to do so in 2021, and 96% said they’ll either increase (67%) or maintain (29%) their spend, according to Wyzowl.
Businesses that adopt video marketing strategy now have an opportunity to stand out from the competition that relies on less rich forms of content, and to position themselves to improve on their video marketing strategy and tactics.
Video does one thing that no other type of content can.
Through storytelling and deep emotional connection, video is able to connect with people on a more human level. And when it comes to marketing, that spells success, in the form of awareness, leads, and conversions.
Video is also incredibly repurposable, further increasing your potential ROI if you’re able able to cost-effectively turn your videos into many different pieces of text, graphic, audio and other video content.
Video content isn’t that much different from other types of content. But like any other content, it sometimes requires a lot of trial and error before you’re able to effectively create video content and distribute it to your target audience, regularly and consistently, in a way that delivers a predictable ROI – especially when you’re doing everything in-house.
Having a formal video production and marketing strategy is essential to determining when and how your business should use video, and being able to take advantage of video whenever the opportunity strikes.
Video Marketing Content
Video can be utilized across all stages of the customer journey and on many different marketing channels. When used strategically, video can drive greater return on your marketing dollar, and in some cases, video content can even be more affordable to create than lesser forms of content.
Because video is often thought of as inherently costly and complex, there’s a counter-intuitive tendency to try to create a single video that covers all the bases. Businesses often needed to be talked out of creating one video, for example, that’s intended to describe the challenges facing their industry, explain how their product works, and to recruit new staff – all at the same time.
The result is a video that’s not particularly good at accomplishing any of these objectives, and is so complex that it takes far longer too edit than it should.
A better approach is to create videos with a very specific purpose, and make sure they’re really good at accomplishing that one goal. These videos tend to far easier and more affordable to create, and allow you to iterate quickly, making each new video more effective than the last.
What Types of Marketing Videos Should You Create for Your Business?
The types of videos you create should be determined by the results you want each of your videos to produce, prioritized by how much of an impact they can have on your bottom line.
Video for Awareness
Before someone can consider your product or service as a solution to their problems, they need to become aware of your brand and offerings. Video is great at getting attention, conveying your message, and people are more likely to engage with video content, and more fully consume and retain your message.
Video for Consideration
You may have your audience’s attention, but they may not be ready to buy yet. Video is a great at keeping your audience moving along the path to becoming a customer because it’s uniquely effective at demonstrating the value of your solution, educating and nurturing prospects, and keeping your solution front-of-mind, until they’re ready to make a buying decision.
Video for Evaluation & Conversions
Before making a buying decision, people tend to do their due diligence and seriously evaluate whether or not to chose your solution. Video, especially with a human face, establishes trust better than any other type of content, which is crucial at the end of the buying cycle, when customers are comparing you with the competition. Video is also effective at all other, earlier conversion-points, from lead to MQL to SQL to sale.
Video Content That Gets Results
When developing a creative brief for a video, either for Thoughtcast Media or one of our customers, we always ask three questions:
- What do you want viewers of your video to think?
- What do you want them to feel?
- And what do you want them to do?
Your answers to these questions will affect the look and feel you’ll want to go for with your videos, as well as the content you’ll cover in each video. Your ability to connect with the viewer on an emotional level and inspire them to take action will determine the success of your marketing videos.
If each of your videos is aligned with your marketing goals and strategy, they have the power to significantly move the needle across all stages of the buying cycle.
Video Marketing Strategy
Video marketing means many things to many people.
Whether you only ever plan on creating a single video or hope to one day make video your primary way of communicating with the market – strategy is paramount.
Most people fall somewhere inbetween these two extremes (we think video should play a much larger role in your broader marketing strategy). Failing to go in with a strategy means your first video is much less likely to turn out how you imagined, and a second video isn’t likely to happen at all.
Investing in the production and advertising of a single video can garner incredible results, and can even put a company on the map (Dollar Shave Club being everyone’s favorite example). However, putting all your eggs into one video is risky business, and this approach almost necessitates a massive ad budget.
On the other hand, learning the skills to make video a core, programmatic part of your marketing strategy, positions you and your company for marketing success, now and long in to the future. Even if you never pick up a camera, being able to deploy, distribute and promote video content, is going to be increasingly in-demand.
Video marketing, like any other marketing discipline, requires strategy and persistence in order to be successful.
You wouldn’t publish one blog post or send one Tweet, and expect to success overnight. Even with all the power that it provides, the same applies to video. If you’re going to make video marketing work, you’ll need to put a strategy in place.
What’s the Right Video Marketing Strategy for you?
When developing a video marketing strategy you need to consider two things:
- What you want to achieve, and how you’re going to measure your success.
- Your current video marketing capabilities, and the resources you’ll need to invest to get you there.
Need help with a video marketing and production strategy?
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The perceived cost and complexity of video turns many businesses away from the idea, but both of these challenges are becoming easier to overcome as more people with video skills enter the workforce every year and new, cutting-edge tools are making it easier and more affordable to create high quality video content.
But video marketing isn’t always easy. Creating a compelling, informative piece of written content that gets traffic is difficult enough on its own.
Add in the complexity of cinematic storytelling, video production and the editing process, and many marketers simply won’t have the resources or the patience to create one video, let alone put a video marketing strategy in motion. But perhaps many more marketers would make video a more important part of their strategy, if they knew just how easy it could be.
You don’t have to go all in on video to make it work for your businesses. When used with precision at key stages of the customer journey, just a few videos can have a massive impact on your bottom line. However, with scale, the benefits of video can be compounded and totally change, for the better, the way you engage with your customers.
Whether you just want to dip your toes in the water of video content marketing using free or cheap tools, or are ready to spend $50,000 trying to create the next viral hit, video has the power to jumpstart or breathe new life into your marketing strategy.
How to Use Marketing Videos
Video is effective in a wide variety of marketing contexts. No matter where or how you use it, you can count on it to enhance your results. Here are some of the most common ways to use video.
Traffic and Awareness
Video is great at getting attention, conveying your message, and attracting clicks. Search and social algorithms love video as much as people do, making it easy to increase your search presence and expand your social reach. People are also far more likely to engage with video content, and to more fully consume and retain your message.
Engagement
Video generates engagement from your audience unlike any other type of content. No matter where people are consuming your content, or what stage of the marketing funnel they’re in, video is able to deliver the engagement you need to move customers down the funnel. Video can enhance your marketing performance on all channels, including; your website, email, social, sales, pay-per-click campaigns, and more.
On your website
The addition of video is a sure-fire way to enhance the on-site performance of your website. Adding video to core pages of your site can lower bounce rates, increase time on site, and even improve search rankings. Used strategically, video is very effective at getting visitors to take action, and complete key conversions along the way to becoming a customer.
On your blog
Almost every company has a blog, but how many are doing video? Using video to enhance written blog content, or as separate or in-series video, can help you stand out from the competition, and opens up new channels and other opportunities to connect with a larger audience. Provide real value in your videos, and keep them coming back for more!
Social media
Social platforms understand that video is key to keeping users on-site and engaging, which means you can attract a massive audience on social with the right video content marketing strategy. Every social network is different, but if you’re able to produce the video content they crave, the opportunities are endless.
Lead Generation and Nurturing
It’s easier to convey information and build rapport with video, making it a particularly strong tool for demonstrating the value of your offer, and getting prospects to provide the information you need to qualify them. Video also has the unique ability (with certain video platforms) to show you exactly what parts of your content were consumed, enabling you to provide a highly personalized and optimized experience.
Growth and Sales
Marketers who use video are growing company revenue 49% faster year-over-year than those who don’t, says the Aberdeen Group. This can again be contributed to video’s ability to engage, convey information, build trust, and all the other benefits mentioned.
Video can also serve as an incredibly effective one-to-one sales tool. Quickly shot, personalized video introductions are a great way to get your foot in the door. A well-shot and well-timed video testimonial can be used to close a sale. And there are many other ways you can used video at the final stages of your sales pipeline.
Email marketing
Simply adding “video” to your email subject lines can provide a quick boost to your open rates, and delivering a relevant video in the body of your email will turn those opens into clicks, views, and maybe even conversions. Whether as part of an automated email marketing campaign or an outbound sales effort, video is incredibly effective at converting email leads into customers.
Ad campaigns & landing pages
Banner Blindness is real, but video is a great at breaking through the noise, and will turn your preconceptions about click-through rates upside down. Video, with it’s ability to build trust and convey value, can also bring a significant boost to your landing page conversion rates. You’ll even be able to target and optimize your campaigns in new ways with the data that video provides.